Disadvantages of Migrating Website to New URL
-
Hi There,
I am currently struggling with the ranking of my website. No matter how many initiatives I try (backlinking, blog commenting, social posting, etc.) I can't seem to make any progression in Google Search. I've done competitive metrics through Open Site Explorer and can't seem to really find the reason why my site is not ranking as well as my competitors. The only one possible glaring element I've thought about is my website URL. This company is in the heating and cooling industry and majority of my competitors have either "heating" or "cooling" or both in their website URL's but mine does not.
Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations on if changing my URL and then redirecting my current URL would be a step in the right direction help me to climb the rankings in Google Search?
Thanks!
-
Thank you so much for the reply!
I've been working on tracking, analyzing and optimizing this particular website for about a year now. I've optimized my homepage for the best and most specific keyword I can and I've got a 94% optimization score on the page (I can't put the keyword in the URL as it's the homepage). I've added in my competitors into OSE and reviewed their backlinks and besides some local advertising backlinks they have received, my Moz stats are much better than the competition. There is one competitor in particular that is mult-national company and I know that as a small business I don't stand a change in ranking higher than them, however, the other top competitor I have in my local market - does not optimize and still ranks higher than my site. One of the largest frustrations I have with this particular competitor is that the page that results higher than mine has little to no content on it and in other searches (because we are in the same industry) - their homepage will rank higher than my optimized interior pages. We use facebook and link back to our service pages which contain our keywords as often as possible and my crawl from Moz shows 1 missing meta description tag (on a category) and that's it.
I did read up on the Moz Blog today and it seems like everything is on-track but there's no progress. I should also mention that the website is built on Wordpress and as far as I know from the stats I am pulling from Moz - I've covered my bases.
I'm not sure what other specifics I can offer that might assist me with this challenge.
I guess at this point - maybe a second set of eyes on an audit (outside of Moz - because I look at that all the time) is what I need????
If you have any recommendations on a comprehensive site audit, I'd be very interested.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this.
-
Thank you so much for the reply!
I've been working on tracking, analyzing and optimizing this particular website for about a year now. I've optimized my homepage for the best and most specific keyword I can and I've got a 94% optimization score on the page (I can't put the keyword in the URL as it's the homepage). I've added in my competitors into OSE and reviewed their backlinks and besides some local advertising backlinks they have received, my Moz stats are much better than the competition. There is one competitor in particular that is mult-national company and I know that as a small business I don't stand a change in ranking higher than them, however, the other top competitor I have in my local market - does not optimize and still ranks higher than my site. One of the largest frustrations I have with this particular competitor is that the page that results higher than mine has little to no content on it and in other searches (because we are in the same industry) - their homepage will rank higher than my optimized interior pages. We use facebook and link back to our service pages which contain our keywords as often as possible and my crawl from Moz shows 1 missing meta description tag (on a category) and that's it.
I did read up on the Moz Blog today and it seems like everything is on-track but there's no progress. I should also mention that the website is built on Wordpress and as far as I know from the stats I am pulling from Moz - I've covered my bases.
I'm not sure what other specifics I can offer that might assist me with this challenge.
I guess at this point - maybe a second set of eyes on an audit (outside of Moz - because I look at that all the time) is what I need????
If you have any recommendations on a comprehensive site audit, I'd be very interested.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this.
-
Hi Matt - As Bernadette said, there are many, many reasons why your site could not be gaining on your competitors in the SERPs. And without specifics, it's tough to say why... but unlikely to be the URL. It's actually probably due to not just one, but several reasons. As you are at the point where you are considering something as drastic as moving your site to a new domain, it sounds like now would be a good time to invest in a comprehensive site audit.
Oh, and did you happen to read today's post on The Moz Blog? I've Optimized My Site, But I'm Still Not Ranking—Help!
-
Matt, there are really a lot of reasons why a site won't seem to gain any ground when it comes to ranking in Google. It could be links, it could be content, it could be lack of social media, it could be a lack of local links and citations, or it could be something else. It could be just that you're in a competitive market and that the competition is doing more (or has been around longer).
Regardless, it's most likely NOT the URL. Every domain name has an equal chance of ranking in the search results. So whether or not your keyword is in the URL really doesn't make any difference. It could still be a URL issue or domain name issue, such as if you have other domain names redirecting to your site or if you have used another domain name in the past that has the same content on it.
Without specifics, it's tough to pinpoint a specific reason why the site's not ranking well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do I redirect SEO from pages on old website to new website with new domain name?
How do I redirect SEO from pages on old website to new website with new domain name? My website in squarespace has good rankings and we have rebranded to a new name and enw domain name, how do I move across the rankings fomr the old site in squarespace to my new site thats in wordpress please?
On-Page Optimization | | Carrotpower0 -
Should I utilize URL re-writes to include keywords and other optimised page elements on my website?
Hi there, I am working on a medical recruitment website: https://wave.com.au/ I have noticed that our Job Search and Job Listings section of the website is lacking a little bit in terms of SEO optimisation. For example, at the moment this is our search page (with locum work type selected): https://wave.com.au/search-locum/results If you add a location, for example, NSW and then click search again, it updates the URL to: https://wave.com.au/search-locum/results?LocumSearchForm_Location[]=NSW&action_doSearch=Search+jobs I did a check what some competitors and leaders in the recruitment industry were doing and I came across: https://www.ochrerecruitment.com.au/jobs/anaesthetics/new-south-wales/locum/ If you click the different filters/options, it updates the URL to include more clearly defined categories. Some websites would even have a H1 heading tag that would update based on the filters/options you selected. Should I set up a set of URL re-writes and re-structure my website a little bit so that dynamic URLs change to static etc.? Does anyone have any best practice knowledge in regards to this? I have been referencing the following article: https://moz.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
On-Page Optimization | | Wavelength_International0 -
301 and the base URL
Hi, please bear with me as I'm pretty new to all this! I've my base URL but obviously want to add keywords to it for seo purposes. Should I redirect from the base URL to the URL with the keywords appended? So my landing page goes from say www.moz.com to www.moz.com/keywords-here. If I do that, should I replicate all the meta data (descriptions etc) on the original landing page? Or does it not matter? Thanks, Nick
On-Page Optimization | | nickwoodward0 -
How important are clean URLs?
Just wanting to understand the importance of clean URLs in regards to SEO effectiveness. Currently, we have URLs for a site that reads as follows: http://www.interhampers.com.au/c/90/Corporate Gift Hampers Should we look into modifying this so that the URL does not have % or figures?
On-Page Optimization | | Gavo1 -
Where to add new content
I run a vBulletin website and vBulletin isnt very SEO friendly. I do fairly well in Google for most of my keywords, but forums dont necessarily build strong page authority etc. My site deals with fishing reports across the state of VA and drives 15-18k sessions a month and close to 100,000 page views a month based on Google Analytics. I want to start targeting new keywords and I am concerned about vBulletin inability to be SEO friendly. Many of my new keywords arent dynamic like fishing reports that are added by members daily. These are more like campgrounds, marinas etc. My thought is to install a Wordpress blog and build out this content so I can efficiently deal with on page SEO. the vBulletin software is installed in the root so I would install wordpress in something like mydomain/lake123/ Is the right thing to do, and will google see multiple sitemaps (one for vbulletin and another for wordpress) and index appropriately? Am I missing something major here? Thanks ~ Brian
On-Page Optimization | | FCBCO0 -
Replacing "_" with "-" in url, results in new url?
We ran SEOmoz's "On-Page Optimization" tool on a url which contains the character "_". According to the tool: "Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems." "Rewrite the URL to contain only standard characters." Therefore we will rewrite the url, replacing "_" with "-". Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH0 -
Ecommerce Product Subcategory URL
Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header. The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories. Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters). Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there? The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories. i.e. domain.co.uk/subcategory or domain.co.uk/category/subcategory Thanks in advance for any advice given.
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0